Celok je menší ako súčet jeho častí

Curator: Mira Keratová

Collaborations with Peter Bartoš: Ľudmila Rampáková, Peter Andráši – Dušan Bada, Iľja Bartoš, Lucia Bartošová, Petra Feriancová, Viliam Figuš, Andreas Fogarasi, Vladimír Havrilla, and other authors

Cooperation on the concept: Andreas Fogarasi

Paleobiological exposition: Daniel Pivko

Exhibition architecture: Jakub Kopec

Graphic design: Aurélia Garová

Supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources

Duration of the exhibition: 26. 11. 2021 – 20. 2. 2022
Open daily except Monday from 11 AM to 6 PM, on Wednesday from 1 PM to 8 PM

The “Whole is less than the sum of its parts” exhibition is built on asymmetrical units and several interventional approaches by the exhibiting authors. In the discourse of Relational Ethics, and from an art-historical as well as contemporary curatorial positions are investigated the landscape design concepts of the landscape work of Peter Bartoš (1938) and his program of so-called ecological culture, in which he has concentrated on the regeneration of relations and the ecology of specific environments. The focus is on his conceptions of urban environments, which he has been dealing with in his conceptual work since the 1970s. Bartoš historical creation, alongside its experimental art qualities and specific esthet-cs, is contemporary not only in the ecological but also the anthropological dimension of an engaged understanding of ecology as relationships. His approaches are also relevant in the context of considerations regarding a more ecological and just future which, in the words of an evolutionary epidemiologist (Rob Wallace), would not separate our ecologies from our economies; they are also in conformty with the perspectives of climatic activism (according to Martin Vrba) and considerations on upcoming adaptation processes and the shared view that future art formats lie outside the gallery infrastructure. From an exhibition with Július Koller in 1968 in the premises of the Municipal Stocking Repair on Klobučnícka street, or later, as part of his nonpublic exhibition “Flashcards, Bulletin Boards and Posters” in the “Slovak Fine Artists and Architects Club” in 1977, i.e. within his so-called culture activities, which Bartoš also calls situations, he has been up to today dynamically developing a sort of bulletin board format in which he conceptu-alizes and regularly updates scattered associative pictures into a set of elaborated mental maps. He disseminates his work selectively, typically by xeroxing. His specific approaches and the ongoing formal and ideological development of the displayed material, and of course the voluminous and dynamic authorial production, are reflected in the overall total conception and architecture of the exhibition. One of the authors of the artistic interventions that dialogically layer Bartoš’ field of interest through the thematization of relationality is Andreas Fogarasi (1977), who undertakes in his work an analysis of the discourse of architecture in relation to concepts of culture and ideology. A relationship in the style of internationalist cooperation united him with Bartoš. A similar intergenerational connection with him is also enjoyed by Petra Feriancová (1977), who investigates the representation and musealization of original natural habitats and applies her dialogue model within the appropriated work. In light of the general location of Bratislava, the exhibition includes a connection to the Vienna urban space (parts of the former MuseumsQuartier, Südbahnhof and others) in the works of the authors Anna Jermolaewa (1970), Ingeborg Strobl (1949 – 2017) and Lois Weinberger (1947 – 2020). A participating author from the incoming generation is Martin Hrvol (1989) with his elaborated series of biotope monuments. The exposition of the exhibi-tion, accompanied by a parallel Paleobiologic Exposition that arose out of a cooperation with the geologist Daniel Pivko, is based on performative moments that direct the choreography of the viewers and bring forth the individual works. Peter Bartoš is a neo avant-garde artist from the generation of the nineteen sixties who in his work dealt with the environment. He did not primarily focused on nature that is wild but yet cultivated by humans – through domesticated animals to the urbanised or cultural environment. He saw the environment holistically, in transdisciplinary and relational frameworks and with a deep understanding for the connections between the original and current situations, putting into perspective the regeneration of the decisive relations. This interconnecting of nature and culture that Bartoš experimented with since the 1960s, in a context of widening of the medium of painting and performative art, is one of the most radical of Bartoš’ concepts. The theory that nature is one thing and art another is considered to be deeply rooted in western culture. As George Gessert stated (A Brief History of Art Involving DNA 1996), in Christian doctrine with adapted elements of Greek phi-losophy there is perpetuated – from the Book of Genesis to the late 19th century – the opinion that art arises from the human mind or soul, and therefore stands apart from nature. Kant, in his Critique of Judgement from the 18th century, was also one of the first to include landscape gardens in art, although not the individual plants in them. Bartoš struggled to bridge this dichotomy and unite the polarities through genetic experiments with pigeons, continuation from zoomedia to zoopark, working on ZOO habitats, his landscape designs for urban parks and a number of random landscape situations in his wanderings through the countryside, finally fixing an understanding of the relationship between nature and culture to the connection of the castle cliff as a prehistoric Carpathian area with the historical and archaeological layers of its settlement.